Picking up the Spare: Dark Knight, Iron Man, WALL-E

There’s an application for the iPhone or the iPod Touch that allows you to add the scrawled Joker make-up to any picture of yourself, whether it’s something you already have or something you take using the devices. This is exactly the sort of thing that I thought should have been part of the campaign and I don’t know if this is an official application from Warner Bros. or not, but it should be.

The Interpublic Group Lab blog (disclosure: I work for an IPG firm) takes a look at the campaign, giving a very basic overview of some of the sites and other marketing ventures taken in support of the movie.

You have to wonder what the folks at the Santikos Theater in San Antonio, Texas were thinking. The theater had been engaging in their own little viral marketing campaign in anticipation of the movie’s release that culminated in a cake that looked like a bomb being sent to a local TV station. That, of course, was followed by the authorities becoming involved when not everyone realized it was just a prank. I give them props for originality but…well…come on.

The movie’s shadow caused a drop in the usual number of independent films being released this past weekend. While the movies that were released or which were already out did fairly well, most decided not to go head-to-head with Batman.

It did, on the other hand, prove to be a blessing for Imax. The movie’s release on the big, big format was a major component not only of the paid campaign but also of the public relations and publicity surrounding the film. It might even prove to be the thing that brings Imax releases of mainstream films out from being “an interesting experiment” and turns it into a must-have part of a movie’s release patter.

Annalee at IO9 uses The Dark Knight as the launching pad for a self-categorized rant on how ARGs are just not very interesting and kind of pointless.

And speaking of the ARG, 42 Entertainment, the interactive agency behind its development and execution, has issued a press release touting just how interesting it was and how it achieved the goals it was designed to meet.

Dan Calladine has an interesting chart of Facebook Wall references to either The Dark Knight, Iron Man or Indiana Jones that shows Batman was the flat-out winner in this rough measure of word-of-mouth buzz.

David Poland picks Iron Man as the smartest campaign by a major studio so far this year. The Dark Knight, Wanted, Kung Fu Panda and a host of other movies covered here on MMM are also in his top ten campaigns of the summer.

Antony Young at AdAge does a mini-review of the campaigns for both Iron Man and The Dark Knight, analyzing them for their different audience approaches. He punts on declaring an overall winner, but each of his sections are worth checking out since he does a decent job of showing how things were executed differently.

Rob Walker discusses the marketing of WALL-E, specifically the portion of it that involved the fictional Buy-N-Large corporation. And he nicely ties that to the notion that much of the movie’s design was inspired by Apple’s products, including Eve, who looks like a more angular, floating iPod.

Mashable has an awesome list of fan sites and other resources that will allow you, if you’re so inclined, to dive deeper into the show’s mythology and backstory as well as official sites for the series and some of the actors from it.

Unfortunately, the marketing campaign didn’t help push the review needle any higher, with Patrick Goldstein noting that this movie marks Fox’s (more or less) 18th straight film to not break a 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes.